 Hello and good morning to EuroPython 2021. I'm Marc, I'm the chair of the EuroPython Society and I would like to take you through the opening of this conference. This year has been a very exciting year. We have the second year doing the EuroPython Conference online. Hopefully next year we will do it in Dublin in person again. But this year has been exciting because we sold so many tickets. So we have more than 1,900 tickets registered from over 86 different countries. So this is really, really good. And lots, lots more than we get for the in-person conference. We would like to give a big shout out to all our sponsors, especially the Keystone Sponsor Optiver, but also to Microsoft and Bloomberg, the Diamond Sponsors, and of course everyone else. Please do visit their sponsor rooms. They are waiting there for you. And you can ask them questions and they will have lots of things to tell you and to show you and to also give out some swag and codes and so on. We'd also like to welcome all the special new EuroPythonistas, so everyone who has not been to a EuroPython conference before. We all want big family and this is essentially the conference of the attendees. This is not, we are organizing it, but it's essentially what the attendees make it to be. And we hope that everyone will feel comfortable, will feel at home. And we'd like to ask our regulars who often come to this conference to help all the newbies to feel at home as well and to show them around. EuroPython 2021 was started, the organization was started six months ago. It was six months of hard work. We wouldn't have been able to pull this off without the fantastic team of volunteers that we have. So a big shout out to them as well. And maybe next year you can then thank them in person. EuroPython is run by the EuroPython Society. This is a non-profit organization. It was founded in 2004. It runs EuroPython, but in the last few years we also extended the scope to support the European Python community. And if you, for example, need financial help and you have an organization in Europe where we can provide some grants maybe, then please contact us. It's all volunteer driven. No one gets money for this. No one is paid. We don't have any staff at the moment. So yeah, these are all free hours that people invest into the organization. So what does EuroPython 2021 offer for you? We have lots of events scheduled. We have more than 100 talks for you. We have six great keynotes. We have a complete data science mini-conference basically embedded into the conference. Most of the talks that are data science related happen in Room Parit. But there are also keynotes and there were training sessions in the last two days which were data science related. So there's a lot of content in that particular area, topic area. We will have a hallway track. I'll come to that later. We have a recruitment session on Thursday. If you're looking for a job or you want to, you know, look around what's available, then please come there and then the sponsors will show you what's available. We have posters, interactive sessions, open space, lightning talks, sprints and hackathons on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. We are going to start with a keynote by Pablo today after the opening. But we also have five other keynotes waiting for you from these very fine ladies and gentlemen. And this is going to be very exciting and very much looking forward to these keynotes. We have lightning talks on every single day. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. These are five-minute talks, very short. You can, you know, do something funny, helpful, informative. It's basically up to you. You can schedule the lightning talk on a Google sheet that we're going to announce. And these are usually lots of fun, these sessions. So, yeah, looking forward to that one as well. If you want to run a session on your own, we have open space. Open space is completely self-organized by the attendees. Again, we have a Google sheet for scheduling things. You can just walk into the room, silly walks. And then, you know, at the time that you scheduled your open space session and then you can start your session there. There's a jitzy widget you can start and you can share screen. You can have, you know, talk to people. It has audio video. So that's fun as well. If you have something to show or if you want to go into more depth, maybe you're doing a talk somewhere and in one of the other rooms and it overruns and then you can continue here in open space. We will have social events and an after-party. Social events are scheduled for today after the keynote, tomorrow after the lightning talks and then on Friday after the closing session we're going to have an after-party. We're going to do some games, music, some beer tasting, some cooking. But of course, you know, we're open to new ideas as well. So if you have anything that you want to run, just let us know we can make it happen. We can give you a room and then you can run your session there. So how will we run EuroPython 2021 online? This year we have chosen a different system. Last year we used Discord for the conference. This year we're using a system called Matrix and it has a front-end called Element. Matrix is completely written in Python, so it fits our conference. We have integrated the chat, the conference rooms into Matrix as widgets. So you can watch the streams directly in Matrix and while you chat you can look at the stream as well. The Matrix and Element system, they also have a built-in JITSY system. JITSY is another conference system. It also does audio video. It's very easy to use. It usually works pretty well. We have that for the sponsor chats. We have that for the open space like I mentioned and we can also enable it in other rooms if needed. For interactive sessions and social we're going to use Zoom because Zoom basically just scales better to higher numbers of attendees. JITSY is good for about 30 people and Zoom scales up to 300 easily. So let's have a quick look at the conference platform that we're using, the Matrix and Element client. On the right you see the typical picture. Here on the left you have the list of rooms. On the right you have the chat. We have the sponsor exhibit in here. We have the training rooms in here. The conference rooms are in that list and the sprint rooms as well. Now these are quite a few rooms. So if you want to let's say focus more on what you actually want to attend there are two ways to do this. One is you can go to the different, let's say the sprint rooms for example if you're not interested in those right now but only on Saturday and Sunday you can make them low priority and then they move into a different category and you can close that and you don't see those rooms anymore. And later on you can get them out of here again by just unticking this. And the second way to do it is to use the filter up here. So let's say you want to see or you wanted to see in the last two days just the training rooms then you can go here and then just type training filter down to the training rooms. We have links in some of the pages. We'd like you to not share those links unless we say that it's okay to share them publicly. The links are mainly going to in some cases to zoom rooms in other cases to the YouTube streams that we have. And so we'd like to ask you to keep them within the conference. Like I said, we have embedded streams of all the different rooms into Matrix. They can be used to replay past sessions and we're also going to share the YouTube links to those. Again, please don't share those. You can pop out these windows by clicking on this small icon that you see here in the upper left. We have a EuroPython lounge. This is a hallway track. It's a very fun thing to do to walk around in there. It's run on Wonder Me. You can enter it from the lobby hallway and we'd really like to invite you to join here and to try it out. It's really a lot of fun. We have a sponsor exhibit. The sponsors are waiting in those rooms for you. Please don't be shy. Please visit them. Please say hello. They really like to get in touch with you and they have nice things for you. Like I said, it's the widgets there are run on Jitsi and you can talk to them in person. We also have a virtual swag page which is up on our website. You go here to setup and then virtual swag. You can pick up some quizzes, coupon codes and other free stuff on there. And of course, we have a code of conduct. So we'd like to ask you to all be nice citizens and to be friendly to each other, to be professional and to not spam. And if you want to read the full code of conduct, we have that on our website. If you have any things to report, then please report to one of these contacts. So we have Anders here. We have myself and we have Naomi who are on Matrix but we're also available by email and by telegram. Right. And that's all I wanted to say. I wanted to remind you that this is the 20th edition of EuroPython. It's been a long ride, a good ride. And we hope you enjoy this conference just as much as the past 19 ones that we had. It's time to celebrate and we would like to take you for a ride maybe next year we can then actually have some champagne or something. Right. So that's all I wanted to say.